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I managed to get this a bit earlier from Amazon UK. This book is also sold by Weta on their website, which is perhaps how I remember first hearing about the book.

Tintin's a motion capture CG film, directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy.

In this book, there are lots to read about the making of the film, like how they capture swimming, walking on sand, animate Snowy, etc. Captain Haddock was actually performed by Andy Serkis, the King Kong/Gollum guy.

The transformation of Herge's characters to 3D is quite stunning. They are modeled by Weta and the details are amazing. They have gotten the skin textures spot on, and sometimes it can be a bit creepy to look at the caricatured version.

Much of the art is actually on trying to find the look for the film. There are some earlier concept art where specific panels of Herge's comics are painted over with a realistic style, using the same composition. Even the shark submarine and checkered rocket were re-imagined with more photo-realism.

The environment art are on the antique market, Tintin's apartment, Haddock's ship, the ocean, the desert and many other locations. The art is very distinctly digital painting, I'm not sure if I like the style here. There's still the charm of comics that's very difficult to translate across medium.

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2 Comments

As a French-Canadian who grew up reading Tintin in its original french version, I'm looking forward to the movie, but I am very ambivalent about the results.
It seems to be getting generally positive reviews so far at least (which I'm only skimming to avoid spoilers).
I just find the hyper-realistically rendered cartoony characters kind of creepy looking.

Book looks nice, but it seems to be lacking in concept sketches. I guess they did not really need to do much of that kind of stuff with all the original Hergé books at their disposal.
I'll just wait to check it at the store before deciding to buy or not.

Saw the movie a couple of weeks ago. From a technical point of view, it's quite an achievement. The images are great, and the motion-capture/performance is quite realistic. Although they opted for a semi-cartoony look for the characters (the body proportions are cartoony, e.g., oversized heads), the inanimate objects (ships, water, cities, towns) are very, very realistic. There are some scenes with humorous things going on in the background. And seeing it in 3D, there are some scenes where just too much is happening at the same time.
The only gripe I have is that I never really cared much about the characters themselves, i.e.g, Tintin gets shot at many times but I never cared if he'd get hurt. And there are only two female minor characters, but I guess Hergé didn't have any female characters in the comics I remember. I mention the "caring" part because Avatar was made using the same technology and the characters were better "fleshed" out and much more realistic. And in Cameron's movie your eye goes exactly where he wants you to, despite all the things that may be going on onscreen. After seeing Tintin, I'm reminded of how amazing Avatar was, not that long ago...

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